Sefton
Delmer and Dudley Clarke are the two main characters of the book Churchill’s
wizards — the British Genius for Deception 1914-1945. This the idea that the
British, and particularly their armed forces, are strangely obsessed with the idea
of deception.
This book
begins with the introduction of camouflage uniforms to European armies,
including Britain just in time for the First World War, then the role of
camouflage of British battlefield installations and observation posts, with
diversions about the ill-fated Dardanelles campaign and Lawrence of Arabia’s campaign
against the Turkish army in the Sinai Desert.
One of
the young British staff officers who worked with Lawrence was Clarke, who
surfaced 20 years later as a mid-rank officer with the British forces in Palestine,
assigned to hunt down the most dangerous activists on the Arab and Jewish size.
The
Middle East and the Mediterranean was where Clarke did most important work,
helping to throw the Germans off their game at 1942 and, not incidentally, creating
the Special Air Service
Some of
his other “diversions” were spectacularly successful, like Operation Mincemeat,
which attached a briefcase of important-looking (fake) documents to the arm of
a dead British civilian whose body was put into the Atlantic off Spain (officially
neutral, but very friendly toward the German side) in the knowledge the
Spanish, and then the Germans, would read the documents inside. This had the
desired effect of convincing the Germans that the British and Americans would land
next in Greece, perhaps Sardinia.
The other
key figure in this book is Sefton Delmer, whose father was a British teacher working
in Berlin before the First World War. He grew up speaking German like a local
and went into journalism, returning to Germany and interviewing Adolf Hitler.
He returned to Britain before the Second World War and was much in demand for
his political insights and his ability to write fast and well. He was put into
a senior position in Britain’s Ministry of Economic Warfare, overseeing propaganda.
(There was a broad line of demarcation between “white” and “black” information.
“White” information was honestly reported news, even bad news, in the belief
this was an investment in getting and keeping the trust of people in Britain
and other countries. “Black” information, on the other hand, was designed to
confuse and demoralize enemy soldiers and civilians. Under Delmer, the British
created a family radio stations that
passed themselves off as something close to underground German radio stations,
German to be sure, but with a healthy degree of cynicism in rumours and
comments. One of them with a sarcastic announcer finally went off the air to
the sound of (fake) gunfire, planting the idea that the “German” station had
finally attracted the attention of the Gestapo --when it was actually
broadcasting from the British heartland!
British
propagandists and intelligence officers became so proficient that they would
collect gossip from German prisoners that was fed back into the “black” radio
stations that made the next batch of prisoners even more likely to talk.
The
highest point of British deception during the war revolved around Garbo -- the
codename for a eccentric Spanish agent who wanted nothing more than to be a
player in world events. To do this, he convinced German intelligence in Spain that
he could be a valuable source reporting from London. With this done, he went to
the British and convinced them he could feed duff information to the Germans –
was not as difficult as British counterintelligence was so efficient during the
war that it had “rolled up in every German agent sent to Britain – there was
nobody to deny the authenticity of Garbo’s reports. With Garbo’s help, a story
was concocted: that the Allied landing in Normandy on June 6, 1944, was a huge diversion
to lure German forces out of the Pas de Calais, where the real invasion
supposedly would take place later. The Germans never caught on to this trick,
which grew to include the use of fake army camps, airfields and landing craft, all
plenty of fake radio communication supporting the scam.
Word of
all of these deceptions were deliberately kept secret for between 10 and 15
years after the work because the British government was painfully aware what it
happened in the 1920s. There had taken root in Germany an unshakeable belief
that the German army had not been defeated on the battlefields, but instead had
been undermined by a weak and confused civilian sector that fell for Allied
lies.In the 1950s, the British shrewdly decided to wait and make sure that democracy
indeed had taken firm root in Germany before autobiographies and books were
permitted under the Official Secrets Act. I think we have to seriously consider
the possibility that the Russians read all these books and are now throwing
these tactics of confusion and demoralization back at us on Facebook and
Twitter
- By Will Chabun
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